Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 432 Editor's Choice: 45
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Let's compare, HazMan
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]University of Miami
Location: Miami, Florida
Established: 1926
Enrollment: 15,670
Stadium: The Orange Bowl
Capacity: 72,319
Even after being Cokerized for the last 6 years, you can be damn sure everyone takes us seriously when we come to town. It ain't the size of the school in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the school.
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RPI still means something
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's just that everyone is playing the same game with the numbers. Don't make your strength of schedule too much stronger than the other contenders or you risk losing a game you can't afford to lose. So between margin of victory and strength of schedule it all comes out to pretty much a wash.
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Better than not doing it, but still
[Read the article: Apple gives iPhone early adopters $100 in store credit]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm glad for the people who got the $100 back. Really, I am. But I hope they now realize that Apple charges a huge premium to people who just have to have their products before everyone else. We are all familiar with Apple's pricing strategies, and it is certain that they are making a very healthy profit at the new price point, so they were making an absolute fortune at $200 more. I won't have any sympathy for them the next time around, and Mr. Jobs probably won't either.
The one thing I thought was kind of comical was the part about getting years of enjoyable service from your Apple product. This from a company that survived for years by purposely avoiding even a whiff of backward compatibility so the faithful would have to replace everything whenever a major upgrade came out. They length of service for their products was more a result of Apple's glacial development cycles than any committment to their customers.
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Access charges
[Read the article: $1, $2 or $5 -- how much would you pay to watch TV?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Another poster mentioned access charges. This has been tried. Back in the day, when GTE sold their telecom division to United Telephone (now known as Sprint), they practically begged them to take a third of the internet backbone off their hands - at no charge. UTS complied. 3 years later GTE realized the enormity of their error, paid a lot of money to buy UUNet (billions?) and then set out to recoup their investment by announcing they were going to charge for every packet that crossed their portion of the backbone. ISP's routed around them just to show that they could and that was the end of that.
It would take a concerted effort by a lot of telecoms to implement any kind of internet usage charge. Ubiquitous wireless in the home makes it easy for anyone with the will and the resources to provide access free of charge. Google would probably squash any effort by Comcast to charge anything other than a flat fee.
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Good Column
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can't help thinking that the death of Deadwood and JFC is intertwined with saving The Wire. Maybe they feel that one insanely good show that most people just don't get is all their schedule can hold. Or maybe they think they need a replacement for The Wire, which is going to be starting it's last season soon. The fact that the police procedural is in fact dead (there is just nowhere to go but down after Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue) and has been replaced by the anti-police procedural (The Shield, The Wire) has escaped them. Maybe it's just me, but I would be fine with 24 hours of quality original programming a week if it was up to the standards of Deadwood, The Sopranos, and The Wire, in place of 11 bad movies shown over and over. And over. We are witnessing the fall of an empire. HBO has gone from being my go to channel to just another mote of dust in the vast wasteland we call cable TV. Lets hope they turn this around soon.
It's obvious that the Neilsen system is broken. How many smart, entertaining shows have we seen cancelled in the last few years because "nobody is watching"? If this were really the case we would all have to wear galoshes whenever we left the house because of all the drool flooding our streets. I just can't believe that America is as stupid as network executives seem to think it is.
Thank God for Burn Notice. Hopefully this is a sign that USA has figured things out. While TNT is making shows the networks never would by strategically inserting the words asshole and shit into various places in the dialog, USA has made a show that is just too much damn fun for the networks. Donovan really is fantastic (just like they say in the promos). Bruce Campbell gets to be Bruce Campbell, which is never a bad thing. The premise and the dialog are entertaining and engaging. The problems he solves are a little contrived but they would be huge to the people involved, but now they have the power of people who topple governments and wage 100 year wars against superpowers on their side working for them and it turns out that all you need is a soldering iron, a cell phone, and a few things from Walgreens to make everything OK again. Kind of like if you had Emeril come over to take care of that big dinner you have to cook for your boss.
Haven't watched Tim Gunn, not going to, but I'm glad he's there for you :)